Trump’s Move On Iran Could Unravel A Signature Obama Achievement

President Trump shows a signed Presidential Memorandum after delivering a statement on the Iran nuclear deal on Tuesday.

Evan Vucci / AP

Last year, as it became clear that President Trump was determined to roll back much of what Barack Obama had done as president, we came up with a list of Obama’s 10 biggest accomplishments. It’s not a definitive list, but we consulted scholars, journalists, some of Obama’s own aides and other lists of major legislation and executive actions during Obama’s tenure. We wanted to have some way to distinguish major policy change from more cosmetic or minor moves — getting rid of, say, a regulation Obama had proposed in late 2016 that had not even gone into effect before he left office, for example.

1. The 2009 economic stimulus and the drop in the unemployment rate that followed it.
2. The bailout of the auto companies.
3. The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare).
4. The Dodd-Frank bill that increased regulation of big banks and created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
5. The repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” that allowed openly gay and lesbian Americans to serve in the U.S. military.
6. The killing of Osama bin Laden.
7. The drawdown of U.S. troops from Afghanistan and Iraq.
8. The agreement reached between Iran, the U.S. and five other nations to attempt to curb Tehran’s nuclear program.
9. The normalization of U.S. relations with Cuba.
10. The 200-nation Paris climate change agreement that Obama helped negotiate and the slew of additional environmental initiatives that were promulgated through new rules and provisions in the stimulus.

Trump has decided to reimpose U.S. sanctions against Iran that Obama suspended as part of the agreement in exchange for a slew of new restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program. (There is still some question about exactly when the sanctions will go back into place and if new ones will be imposed.)

Obviously, the most important question regarding this agreement is Iran’s actual capacity to develop and use nuclear weapons. We don’t know if Trump’s approach will be more or less effective than Obama’s in limiting that capacity. And we don’t yet know how Iran or the other five countries that participated in this agreement will react.

But I think there are four important lessons from Trump’s move on Iran:

1. Trump didn’t get rid of many of Obama’s major policies in his first year, but that doesn’t mean he won’t over time

Just because something didn’t happen right away doesn’t mean it won’t happen. The Iran deal is only the latest example. The Trump administration failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act legislatively, but it has reshaped Obamacare’s insurance marketplaces. The administration is now seeking to change the law’s Medicaid program by getting states to require people enrolled in Medicaid to either have jobs or be in college or a job-training program. Obamacare could be a much different program by 2020, even if it remains the law of the land. Trump is also getting rid of many Obama-era environmental policies, another signature initiative of the last administration.

2. Trump is reversing Obama’s broader vision of foreign policy

Trump’s decision to exit the Iran deal is a big deal in and of itself, but it’s also a good stand-in for a broader doctrinal difference between Obama and Trump: unilateralism vs. multilateralism.

4. Trump governs like a Republican, Example No. 6,214

Trump’s decision is big news. And the way he has hinted about this move for more than a year without actually making it is another example of his unorthodox governing style. But remember: Senior Republicans on Capitol Hill strongly opposed the Iran agreement when Obama made it in 2015. The otherRepublicans who ran for president in 2016 also opposed this agreement and suggested they would get rid of it too. Would, say, Jeb Bush — a more centrist and establishment Republican — have been more likely than Trump to reverse his campaign trail pledge on this issue and try to keep the U.S. in this deal? I think so. But on Iran policy, it’s important to emphasize that Trump’s move was not a particularly Trumpy decision; it was a Republican one.